The practice of opening fraudulent accounts in the name of customers who didn’t want them—often forging their signatures in the process—reportedly began at Wells Fargoas far back as 2005, if not earlier.
In 2005, the year that John Stumpf took over as CEO, a Wells Fargo secretary named Julie Tishkoff wrote to the HR department to report that she had seen bank employees creating fake accounts with forged signatures, the New York Times reports.
